Football History

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The American football playbook boasts an arsenal of throws, each designed to exploit specific defensive weaknesses. However, one unassuming play, the shovel pass, carves a unique niche. Unlike the glamorous deep ball or the precise drop pass, the shovel pass thrives in simplicity.

This post welcomes Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology as he delves into the murky origins of this deceptive play, exploring its evolution from a potential improvisation to a strategic weapon in the modern NFL. We'll examine the technical aspects of the shovel pass, its tactical advantages, and the impact it has had on the way offenses approach moving the ball downfield. Prepare to get down and dirty, as we uncover the surprising history and strategic power of the shovel pass.

You can find Tim's original Tidbit on this subject complete with images, at ESlowing The Pass Rush With A Shovel.

-Transcription of Slow Pass Rush with a Shovel with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to another day where we get to visit with our friend Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. This is a good opportunity for us to go Dutch on this podcast. To go Dutch on this podcast.

Dutch Myer was the coach. Oh, okay. All right.

I had to think about that for a second. I thought, you know. Well, this shows that, you know, this is not rehearsed, right? Right, right.

You're name dropping already. I throw these singers out at you and you're like. Usually it's a dad joke segue into the title.

And the title, folks, and this is my confusion, is slowing the pass rush with a shovel. So I'm trying to think what Dutch, if he's doing a play on the word on ditch or, you know, I don't know. Dutch Meyer.

Dutch Meyer. Okay. Well, why don't you tell us a story about Dutch Meyer and what he has to do with the pass rush being slowed? Yeah.

So, I mean, this is, you know, I mean, nowadays we had a recent podcast about the draw play, which, you know, has, you know, is basically kind of shows up probably in the late thirties and then, but really became more commonplace. The draw play that we now know, probably more late forties, you know, kind of a play. And so this idea of, you know, but so the whole purpose of the draw play is to give the defense one look, you know, you're showing them pass when you're actually running it.

Well, before they develop the draw play, they still had the same need of trying to deceive the defense. And one of the ways that they developed best as I can tell, you know, around the early 32, 31, 32 kind of timeframe was the shovel pass. And so, you know, if you think about like a wing T formation at the time, they might've had a wing over on the, not wing T, I'm sorry, but you know, single wing.

They might've had a wing over on the right-hand side till back gets a deep snap, you know, from the center. And then the, the wing on the right-hand side crosses comes across the formation and the quarterback doesn't talk some kind of toss or flip, even a shovel pass to that guy as he's going right to left. So, so that was, you know, and it was one of those plays where, you know, as the defense is coming in, you're, you're, you're trying to get it to somebody who's crossing over just so that they have to be looking out is, is this a play that they're going to run? Right.

I mean, is this a, is this something I need to guard against? And so it was one of the, one of the ways to slow down the pass rush. And there weren't very many of them back then. There weren't very many ways to slow them down was to, was a shovel pass.

So in the 39 Cotton Bowl game, you know, this was a game where TCU had three players drafted the next year in the first 10 of the NFL draft. And, and what their, the number one pick in the draft was Davey O'Brien, who was TCU's quarterback. And you can see him in the background, but he was, you know, five, eight, you know, fairly stockly built guy, but, you know you know, he was a hell of a hell of a quarterback and just, you know, really smart guy, all that kind of thing.

So, so they were, you know, at the time TCU was one of the teams that threw the ball all over the yard, you know, now nothing like happens today, but you know, when they, they played Carnegie Tech in that game and you know, they, both teams rushed for about 150 yards, but TCU passed for on the order of 250, whereas Carnegie passed for like 60 or so yards. So it was one of those games where, you know, they just, TCU was clearly the better player, but, or the better team, but during the game, they threw eight shovel passes. Right.

So it kind of tells you, I mean, name a game nowadays where, where a team throws eight shovel passes, just doesn't happen, you know, doesn't happen. But for them, that was like one of their central plays because, you know, a lot of the other ways that we, you know, quarterbacks still had to throw the, in college, quarterbacks still had to be five yards behind the line of scrimmage to throw a pass. So none of our bubble screens and none of our quick, quick slants, none of those existed.

They were illegal. And so this was one way that they could slow down the pass was a shovel. So, so they completed five of the eight shovel passes.

And that was one of the ways in the second half, they advanced ball down the field. And because this is also in the days of, you know, essentially no or very limited substitutions. O'Brien, the quarterback kicks the game winning field goal in the fourth quarter.

Right. I mean, it's been a while, you know, since I remember a big time quarterback in a bowl game, kicking a field goal to win the game. Now, I mean, I don't know when the last time was, you know, when that happened, there were, there's been some punters like Greg Martin, you know, he's a guy that, you know, maybe some listeners remember he punted, but it's been, you know, Blanda probably was the last guy that most of us can think of though.

And yeah. But you had Doug Flutie do a drop kick one time, but it got no points. So I don't think it was more of a. Yeah.

I mean, that, that was basically a circus kick. Right. Right.

And which is fine, but you know, for a guy who did the regular kicking for his team, O'Brien was one of the last ones and he was, you know, place kicking, not, not drop kicking. So anyways, it's just, you know, I guess it's just one of those things where, you know, it's one of those period pieces where, you know, where they're using the shovel pass in a way that we don't use today, but make sense that they had developed it. And then the same guy who's throwing the shovel pass is a guy who kicks a game winning field goal.

So then he ends up, you know, he only played like two years in the NFL. He, he ended up, you know, I think he just didn't like the pro game very much. And he was on a really bad team.

And so he ended up, he left, uh, left the NFL and became an FBI agent. That's back in that era where you make more money, you know, working in a grocery store than playing in the NFL too. And you don't get hurt as much.

So, but yeah, the, the shovel pass. So that's, uh, you know, traditionally one of the safest passes to throw because it looks weird when it's an incomplete pass, but it's not a fumble because it's a forward pass if it's dropped and it's hard for defenders to see it because you're sort of hidden behind those, those big guys up front, uh, with the throwing actions. It's really not enunciated like, uh, an over the shoulder passes.

Yeah. The challenge is, you know, it's, it's hard to know now, like how much traffic there was coming in and coming at the quarterback as the guys crossing. Um, you know, I, I didn't find any game film of that particular game.

So, um, Gosh, you would think the defenders would start to get wise to it after a little while. So maybe they just were inept. And then it served its purpose, right? I mean, that's right.

It slowed down the pass rush if they got wise to it, but yeah. Um, or, you know, maybe they left some guy, guy to be a spy or something, but you know, they weren't that bright back then. No, no surprise, especially a Western Pennsylvania team.

God, Carnegie, you know, that's, they should be brilliant. Well, they lost. So yeah, no wonder they're, they don't have a D one program anymore.

Uh, interesting stuff, Tim. That's a, that's a great story. And to hear about Davey O'Brien and, uh, you know, some of his, uh, great feats of football.

So that's some cool things. So you have some very interesting things, not only about players like Davey O'Brien and teams like, you know, TCU and a concept of the shovel pass, but you have all kinds of different, uh, intricacies of the made football, the game that it is. And some are forgotten except by folks like you reminding us on your daily tidbits on your website.

So maybe you could share, uh, you know, where people can find, uh, your, your writings at. Sure. Just, uh, go to footballarchaeology.com. Um, you know, I've got a whole archive now, you know, about a thousand articles out there on different, different elements of the game.

And, uh, so I have added subscribe. If you want to get an email every time that I publish an article, otherwise follow me on Twitter, follow me on Substack or follow me on threads and, or just go out to the site whenever you feel like it. All right.

Well, excellent job as always, Tim, we really appreciate, uh, getting informed and educated on the, the arts of football from yesteryear. And we would love to hear more about it next week. And thanks for going Dutch.

Yeah. Thanks Dutch.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

There was once a power-house football eleven from St. Louis University. It was back in 1906 and these guys were so very good on the gridiron, however a trip to the West Coast tripped them up perhaps from immortal status.

Timothy P Brown of Football Archaeology joined us to tell the saga of this forgotten team and their great run and downfall, and maybe what could have been.

[-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on St. Louis University’s Trip West
Hello, my football friends. It's Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. Welcome to another Tuesday, when we will visit with our friend Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com to discuss one of his famous tidbits. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.
Darin, seeing and hearing from you in the new year is good.
Looking forward to a great 2024. Yeah, me too. It is a new year, and we're coming out swinging tonight to talk about this great subject matter you have from 100 and almost 120 years ago with a very famous team at a very famous time in football history.
You have it titled your tidbit from July of this year, 2023, St. Louis U's ill-fated trip west. So what can you tell us about St. Louis U and their ill-fated trip? Yeah, so I think one of the things that... I'm always intrigued by stories of teams that have since dropped football or de-emphasized football. And part of what I enjoy about all kinds of history, it doesn't matter what the subject matter is, is the kind of what if things had been turned out differently? What if they'd gone left instead of right? I mean, there are so many things in history that things could have gone differently.
And so I just find that when a school drops the ball, it's like, well, what if they'd done something? What if they'd kept it? What would the world look like now? So St. Louis U, most people don't associate with football, but right after the introduction of the forward pass, they were one of the top teams in the country. They were the first team to throw a forward pass in a regular season game. And that in 1906, they went 11-0.
They had a guy named Eddie Kokums coaching them. He played at Wisconsin and ended up at St. Louis U. He was just ahead of everybody else in terms of thinking about the forward pass. He also had a guy named Bradbury Robinson, who so happened to have learned how to throw an overhand spiral while he was playing at Wisconsin.
And then he transferred down to St. Louis U. And so St. Louis U. creates this offense. And this is just one of these things, it's just like, okay, when they first introduced forward pass, how do you throw the damn ball? And what do pass patterns look like? And what does pass protection look like? It's all that had to be invented. And so, you know, he was way ahead of his time, but their fundamental route was to send four guys out, and they ran button hooks.
When the quarterback was ready to throw the ball, he would yell and hike, and everybody would turn around for the button hook, and the ball would come to one of them, right? And so, I mean, somehow, that was their core pattern, and they ran it over and over again. And, you know, they were successful. They went 11-0.
And I mean, they beat a lot of really good teams. But they were out there in St. Louis, and so, you know, all you snobby people out East like you, you know, weren't paying attention to what was happening out in the great Midwest. So anyway, so then 1907 comes around.
Despite their success, they had only about 16 players on the team. At times, due to injuries and other factors, they'd only have about 13 guys show up for practice. They couldn't even scrimmage.
The other weird thing is that almost all the players on the team were in medical school. So I'm not sure back then, you know, back then, med school and law school were sometimes undergrad and dental school was the same thing. A lot of times, they were undergrad.
I'm not sure. At that point, it probably just dealt with leeches and bloodletting. Yeah, yeah.
So, but you know, you need that. You need that alternative medicine. So, so, so anyways, I mean, it's just an unusual roster and situation, but they still were really good.
They, you know, their first five opponents, they blog what's now Missouri S&T, Southeast Missouri State, Arkansas, Creighton, and Wash U. So then they go to Wabash, who at the time was a really good team. And St. Louis was down a couple of guys, and they ended up losing 11 to 12. And then, the next two weeks, they beat out. They beat Kansas 17, nothing, then Nebraska 34, nothing.
You know, so they ended up finishing seven and one, and they put away their pads and all that stuff. And, you know, the season's over, except then they, that's kind of announced that they're going to be heading out West for a couple of games over the Christmas break. So, and, you know, at the time, no one did that.
They were the fifth team to ever cross the Rockies to play a football game. Chicago did it in 1894, and Carlisle did it twice. Then Michigan went to Pasadena to play the first Rose Bowl in 1902.
So here it's 1907, they're the fifth one to cross the mountains. So they go, they go to play Washington State. And I would just say, you know, since you're a former football official, it sounds from the newspaper reports like the officials weren't all that impartial in some of their calls for the game.
At least that was the St. Louis U perspective. But so they ended up losing the game. And then, then two, then that was Christmas Day.
On New Year's Day, they played a team called Multnomah Athletic Club, which was one of the top teams on the West Coast through World War I. They just had a lot of former college football players. They had a great stadium.
Oregon, Oregon State used to play at Multnomah Stadium well into the 1950s, maybe later than that. Oh, sounds like, you know, St. Louis, you kind of disagreed with some of the officiating that game too. And they lose 11 to six.
So here they went all that way, you know, a couple thousand miles across the country. Took them days to get there and days to get back. And they end up, you know, losing two games.
But you know, great life experience for all the players and all that stuff. So, but it's, you know, so that's just one of those things where, you know, you think about it. Right after, you know, four passes were invented or made legal, St. Louis U is one of the top teams, certainly in the Midwest, if not the country.
And then, you know, Kochems stays on to coach for one more year, and then he leaves and basically, you know, leaves football for the most part. And, you know, St. Louis U basically never achieved the same level of greatness. I think they dropped football in 1949, something like that.
So, I know I wrote this in a different tidbit, but one other, what might have been a kind of story about them was that in 1914, a new graduate from Notre Dame, a guy named Rockne, was planning to go to medical school at St. Louis U and he wanted to help coach football. And the medical people said, no, you can't do that. If you're going to be in med school, you're going to be in med school.
If you want to coach, you can coach, but you can't do both. So, Rockne ends up staying at Notre Dame, and then, you know, we know what happens there. But, you know, you just think about that.
Had Rockne gone to medical school, maybe he just becomes a physician and we never hear the guy's name again. Maybe he coaches and, you know, has similar success. I mean, you got to believe he would have had success at St. Louis U, maybe not the same level, but very similar kinds of schools at the time.
So, you know, maybe today we'd be cheering on the St. Louis U Billikens in major bowl games instead of the Fighting Irish. But, you know, the four horsemen of St. Louis U. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I lived in St. Louis for 14 years, so I'm very familiar with the city, but yeah, it ended, St. Louis really became the prominent soccer, you know, hotbed in the States for decades and decades.
Both St. Louis U and Wash U were big-time soccer programs, you know, and there just was never the same, you know, now like Lindenwood is a D1 program, but, you know, until just the last two, three years, they didn't have D1 football in a city of that size. And they don't have professional football anymore, either. Yeah, yeah.
Well, I'm not sure they ever did. Well, they were in a Super Bowl with the Rams when the Rams were there. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. You're right.
You're right. I was thinking more of the St. Louis football Cardinals. Yeah.
Yeah. So, I went to a few of those games. Yeah.
I'll bet. I'll bet. Well, hey, that's a great story.
And, you know, on a great program that I love rekindling these programs from yesterday, just like you said earlier, and, you know, bringing some remembrance to them and, you know, sharing these memories of them. So really appreciate you doing that, Tim. And you have these tidbits that are coming out, you know, every night and, you know, maybe you could share with the audience how they too can partake in these.
Yeah, it's really simple. The best thing is to go to footballarchaeology.com and subscribe. You can subscribe for free, and then you'll have access to whatever's there.
I also, you know, post everything on threads and on Twitter, both under the football archaeology name. All right. Timothy P. Brown, footballarchaeology.com. We thank you once again for sharing this great story from football of antiquity, and we will talk to you again next week.
Very good. Thank you, sir.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

In the modern era of College football, the reward for a team at season's end is to make it to one of the big holiday bowl games and win it. Hoefully they are ranked high enough to be playing in the college playoff format for a National Title.

Timothy Brown of Football Archaeoloogy joined us in 2023 to tell the tale of the first team to win at least one of each of the "Major" Bowl games.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on the Georgia Tech Grand Slam

Hello, my football friend, Darin Hayes, of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to Tuesday at FootballArcheology.com. Timothy P. Brown joins us to talk about another one of his amazing tidbits on football history. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin. Thank you. I look forward to chatting once again about old-time football.

Yeah, this podcast airs in December, and we're getting into the college football championships, the end of the season, and bowl games.

And that's what we're thinking about as far as college football. And you posted a very interesting story back in June about the Ramblin' Wreck of Georgia Tech. And we'd sure love to hear about this old-time football.

Yeah, so this story is, uh, you know, I called it the, um, I forget exactly what I called it. It was basically about Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech hits football's first Grand Slam, which is your title.

Yeah. So football's first Grand Slam. I knew the Grand Slam.

I didn't know exactly how I worded it, but I also want to point out that they hit the reason; well, part of the contribution to the Grand Slam was that they hit a rare triple as well. And the rare triple was the fact that Georgia Tech, I mean, had three absolute stud coaches right in a row. Those three coaches have handled the team for 63 combined years.

You know, it's just one of those, like, you know, how many, you know, I mean, like, if you just think about, try to think about other places that have had phenomenally, or just very successful coaches, uh, and to have three in a row, I mean, Notre Dame has had some great coaches, but a lot of them didn't really last that long. No, not 63 years between the three of them. Yeah.

I mean, you know, Ohio State and Michigan, and you know, I mean, there's a USC, I mean, name, and whoever you want. There just aren't too many. Maybe Oklahoma or Texas or somebody had, you know, but they've tended to have somebody that just wasn't great in between or didn't last that long. But here are the three for Georgia Tech, which started in 1904 and ran through 1919 with a 102-29-7 record.

So, John Heisman won 70, nearly 78% of his games. So, most football fans have heard of him. Um, he was followed by a guy who played there and then coached under Heisman named, you know, Bill Alexander, who, you know, isn't as, uh, didn't have as great a record.

He had some uneven seasons, but he also had just some absolute stud seasons. So he went 134 and 95 and 15, um, you know, for 0.585, you know, a record. And then he was followed by Bobby Dodd, who, you know, was an assistant under Alexander.

And so Bobby Dodd goes from 1945 to 1966, and he goes 165-64-8. So, for 0.721 percent. So, basically, those three guys from 1904 to 1966 are the three coaches of Georgia Tech, you know, it's just crazy.

So then during, um, so of the three, just from a pure record standpoint, Alexander is the least successful. And yet it was during his time that Georgia Tech, I mean, think about it. He's the least in terms of winning percentage.

And yet, during his time, he won, and they beat Cal in the 1939 Rose Bowl. He beat Missouri in the 1940 Orange Bowl. They lost to Texas in the 1943 Cotton Bowl.

And then they beat Tulsa in the 1944 Sugar Bowl. And so his grand slam was that they were the first team to play in the Rose, the Orange, the Cotton, and the Sugar, which were the four games until, I don't know, uh, 85 ish or something like when the Fiesta started, you know, being considered along those lines as a, you know, in terms of the top four bowl games. So, um, you know, so at the time that, you know, it was, people considered it a big deal that they were the first ones to play in all four.

Now, some teams didn't go to bowl games at all. And conferences that didn't go to bowl games at all. And, you know, they were able to do some things, maybe other teams couldn't, but I don't care what, you know, they were the first ones.

And so, you know, really an impressive feat. Just think about that. What are, I mean, you have to have many things fall into place to be invited to each of those particular bowl games because they're looking for certain criteria each year. You have to fall in that to get an invite first of all, and then to go and beat an opponent who is a worthy opponent that's, you know, looked upon as your equal because they're trying to get the best matchup they can in those games and, you know, and to win each of those.

I mean, that is quite a feat if you really sit there and think about it. Yeah. And I think, you know, these, you know, like last week's podcast, we talked about warriors.

And so this, you know, a couple of these wins occurred during war years. So, they probably chose Southern teams a bit more than they would have otherwise, just to reduce travel and, you know, easier access for their alums to attend the game. But again, make up any scenario you want.

They were still the first ones playing in a game, so it's a big deal. And, you know, they ended up. He stepped down after winning, or no; he then took Georgia Tech to the 45 Orange Bowl.

So he ran through those four, the four we already mentioned. Then he went to the Orange Bowl again in 45. And then he resigned after that.

And Bobby Dodd took over. He can stick it out three more years and try to get the double. Yeah.

Yeah. Hit everyone twice. Man.

Yeah. So, I mean, it is a pretty remarkable record. Alexander was also one of those guys who was just a pretty innovative guy.

I mean, some of the things he did now seem kind of goofy. I've written in the past about him using the reverse QB. And I think he may have used a side-saddle QB at times.

But, you know, the reverse QB took the ball, like had his butt against the center's butt, and then took the snap between his legs, and then tossed it, you know, to a single wing kind of formation, tossed it left or right or backward. But. Yeah, I remember our conversation.

We did a podcast on your side saddle, probably back a year ago. But I remember that. That's, man, that is fascinating.

So, going back 80 years ago, and just actually 100 years ago or more with Heisman, when you think about it, I mean, just a great program. And we don't think about Georgia Tech in that light anymore because there's sort of they're overshadowed by some of their fellow teams that are in that area, you know, Georgia, for one, who's phenomenal the last few years, especially. But you have to look back at some of these teams and give them credit because they had some really strong programs back in that day and the errors with, you know, those three coaches 60 some years.

Wow, that's a tip your hat off to the program directors there. Yeah. And I mean, they played in a lot of big games.

I mean, back in, you know, in the World War One era, you know, Pitt and Georgia Tech came a couple of really big, you know, games that they played kind of national championship consequences, you know, that kind of thing. And, you know, they played in the 29 Rose Bowl when, you know, the wrong way Regal ran, the tip California who picked up the ball ran the wrong way. And, you know, it ended up at the end of the day, which is the reason Georgia Tech won the game.

But, you know, so I mean, they were involved in some really, some really big games. And, you know, like you said, not quite as much anymore, but, you know, they still play at a very high level and, you know, great school, all that kind of stuff. Well, Tim, it always amazes me, the stories that you come up with, and you do this daily in your tidbits, just some, you know, maybe not the mainstream of what we think of mainstream football today, you know, very popular from 80 years ago, but, you know, some of these teams that probably should get more attention, like these Georgia Tech teams, and some of the elements that we discussed today with going to the four bowl games, but you're doing this daily.

Why don't you share with the audience how they, too, can participate in reading your daily tidbit? Yeah, so, you know, the easiest thing to do is just go to footballarchaeology.com. And, you know, at the end of every article, there's an opportunity to subscribe. Just hit the button to subscribe and sign up; it's free. And then every day, you'll get an email that, basically, seven o'clock Eastern, you'll get an email story.

Otherwise, you know, you can follow me. I'm still publishing on Twitter, threads, and the Substack app, or you can bookmark the site and show up whenever you want to. Yeah, and I must add that when you go into your Substack on footballarchaeology.com, on your Substack, and you go into the tidbit section, there's a nice little search function there. So if you want to look up, you know, anything else about, you know, coach Bobby Dodds on there, any other articles that you have them in there, it'll take you right to those and give you a nice listing.

You get a nice round, I guess, a full belly of what Bobby Dodds was to football. It's the footballarchaeology.com site. Tim, we really appreciate you coming on here and sharing this.

And we would love to talk to you again next Tuesday about some more great football. Very good. Look forward to it.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

---

In the hazy days of early American football, before forward passes soared and helmets resembled leather buckets, a curious rule reigned supreme: the fumble out of bounds. Unlike today's automatic touchback, a loose ball crossing the sidelines triggered a bizarre dance of possession.

Fumbles were not over until they were possessed by a player, even if they went out of bounds. This led to some crazy plays that Timothy P Brown of Football Archaeology discusses.

If the offense fumbled near their own end zone, the opposing team gained the ball at the point of recovery, no matter how deep it sailed out. Imagine the frantic scramble, desperation dives into sideline bleachers, and potential chaos as defensive players chased a wayward pigskin like oversized puppies after a chew toy.

However, if the fumble happened near the opponent's end zone, the offensive team retained possession even if it bounced through the stands and landed on a passing pigeon. This paradoxical scenario rewarded sloppiness near enemy territory, potentially turning fumbles into first downs through sheer serendipity.

This strange rule, abolished in the 1930s, reflected the nascent nature of the sport, where improvisation and quirky quirks abounded. While it introduced an element of slapstick into the game, it also highlighted the ever-evolving nature of football's laws, constantly adapting to the growing complexity and athleticism on the field. So, the next time you see a fumble careen towards the sideline, remember: it could have been a winning lottery ticket in the gridiron gamble of a bygone era.

-Transcription of Timothy Brown on Live-Fumbles-Out Bounds

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And we have another great evening with Timothy P. Brown of Football Archeology, discussing one of his great tidbits that he shares with us each and every evening on Twitter and on email.

Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, thank you, Mr. Hayes. Looking forward to chatting once again about oblate spheroid stuff.

Wow, we're getting into the geometry of the game a little bit. That's right. I got an A in high school geometry.

Did you really? Well, I believe you did because this topic that you have tonight involves a little bit of the geometry of the ball, I'm sure. You never know which way that ball is going to bounce. And you have a very interesting subject of football from yesteryear that we probably wouldn't recognize today.

If we saw this happen and officials let it go, we would be screaming and ripping our hair out from the stands and throwing things at our TV set. So why don't you share with us the topic tonight and the story behind it? Yeah. So the issue here is that when football began, they basically adopted a rule from rugby that when the ball went into touch, what we now call out of bounds, the ball remained live.

So for us now, we think, oh, the ball is out of bounds, so it's dead. Well, no, that wasn't the case. And so, if you think about it, it's comparable to the original rules for scoring a touchdown.

When you got into the end zone, the guy with the ball had to touch the ball down to the ground, which is why we call it a touchdown. And so until he did that, the ball remained live. And so they had much the same rule in place for the ball crossing the boundary line and on the sidelines, not just the end lines or the goal lines, that in order for the ball to become dead, somebody on one of the two teams had to be out of bounds and touch the ball to the ground.

So that's when the ball went dead. So it's just one of those things that we can't fathom. But when you think about it, the consequences of that rule mean that if the ball tumbles out of bounds, there could be obstacles.

Depending on the field, there could be trees. There could be players on your side or on the opposing side. There could be water buckets.

There could be carts and cars and horses and buggies and running tracks. A lot of the fans, you see some of those games where the fans are right on the sidelines. This could really cause some calamity there.

Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of fields. Virtually every field early on, where the sidelines, and I've got a bunch of pictures of these, the sidelines are just ropes.

There's a rope. And even the rule book talks about people behind the ropes. They're talking about fans behind the ropes.

Because they were just roped off, anyway, there's even a great story. In 1892, the University of Chicago took a train across the country, went out to play Stanford a couple of times, and they got a couple of other games in there.

But they were playing Stanford in San Francisco, and the ball went out of bounds and bounced over a fence. And one of the Stanford players would start to go for it. And Chicago had a guy who was a hurdler on the track team, and he hurdled the fence.

And ended up getting the ball before the Stanford guy could. But if you just think about it, in the tidbit itself, I've got some images like you described of the fans and the perimeter. I've got a picture of the University of Maine.

They had a 25-piece band sitting right along the sideline. So the ball could have gone running in there, and the sousaphone or tuba player or piccolo player or whatever could have gotten in the way. Yeah, your image of the Iowa State game with the fans on it.

I think there are fans like five deep all the way around the field, it looks like. I'm surprised that if you were standing on the outside, you wouldn't be able to see any of the players. That's for sure.

Yeah, and if you went and got concessions, there weren't TV screens up there showing you what was going on either. Anyways, all that continued until 1926. And that's when they finally changed the rule.

And at that point, they made it so that the last person to touch it, their team, got possession of it once it was out of bounds. And then later on, it was the last team to possess the ball while in bounds. So initially it was touch, then it became possession before it went out of bounds.

So anyways, it's one of those old-time rules that you just can't believe was in place. But it made sense based on the game's origins. But I just can't imagine some of the things that must have happened.

You know, the guys fighting and everything to get to the ball amid crowds and fans and teammates and whatever. Yeah, it had to be. Now, I just want some clarification on what you said early on.

The rugby term for being in touch, you're saying that's when the man's on the ground touching the ball. That's when the ball's in touch, or when it goes out of bounds, it's in touch. So, out of bounds, I was in touch.

So, the sidelines were called the touchlines. Okay. So, you know, that was just for whatever reason.

I mean, it gets a little bit confusing, too. Just, you know, but so I'm not sure exactly why they called it in touch, but they did. And then, but that was for the sidelines.

That's the out-of-bounds side. And then, you know, once you cross the goal line, you still, you know, old-time films and even in rugby today, you sometimes you see the guy, he'll kneel down and plant the ball to the ground. That's what was the case in football, too.

You had to, you had to for the touchdown. I was just trying, I was looking more from the sideline, what we call the sideline point of view, seeing in touch it, seeing if there was a correlation to try to understand it better.

So, okay. Hey, that's great stuff, as always. You know, that's definitely a fascinating thing.

And it's a way of really looking foreign to us today. As we said, in the beginning, for a ball to go out of bounds, people, you know, 22 guys were chasing it through the trees, the crowds, the bleachers, and everything else. Yeah.

We remember, you know when this stuff was first happening, and when it was really early on, the rest didn't have whistles yet. So, you know, it was all just, you know, they were fighting in there, and somehow, they figured out who had the ball. Yeah.

Officiating nightmare. Thank God I didn't officiate back then. So that's rude.

Well, Tim, that is some great stuff, as always. And your tidbits are coming out each and every day. Tell us how to share those.

And why don't you tell us also about your book, you know, that's still on sale? You know, the hot, hot hike a little bit about that, where people can get that too. Yeah.

So, you know, you can. The easiest thing is to subscribe, you know, go to footballarchaeology.com, and you know, there is a free process to subscribe. And that'll get you an email every night with the story. And again, you don't have to read it that night.

You can read it two weeks later, or you can read whatever you want. But at least you have access to it. And if you want to read it, you've got it.

Otherwise, follow me on Twitter. And then, you know, the book is available. All three of my books are available on Amazon.

So hot, hot hike, you know, either search for that or search Timothy P. Brown. There are a couple of Timothy P. Browns, but I'm the only one who writes books on football. So you should be able to find me.

And, you know, in particular, if you're somebody, you know, if you've got a Kindle Unlimited plan, you know, you can read it for free. So, you know, it's just like streaming anything else. You know, nowadays you just, it's available.

So, of course, I'm more than happy to sell you a paper copy, which is. Yeah, that's great to have too. It's a great reference, especially, you know, hike and when football became football are great reference points.

I use it all the time to look up things, and people have questions, or I have questions. It's an excellent source. So, it was very well done tonight.

We thank you for your time and for sharing your knowledge, Tim. And we'll talk to you again next Tuesday. Hey, look forward to it.

See you in a week.

-Frequently Asked Questions About an American Football Field:

-How long is a football field? A football field from goal line to goal line is 100 yards long with two ten-yard deep end zones. Want to know more about the evolution of the playing field, you are in the right place as we covered it here:Field Size Evolution.

-How wide is a football field? Most levels of American football play on a field that is 53.3 yards wide.

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Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology joins us again this week to educate us on another aspect of football. This week Tim brings to us the honor he received in his research that brought him national attention. I am talking like the National Archives display attention! Listen in on Tim's great news!

-Transcribed Chat on the National Archives Celebration of Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And it is Tuesday.

And once again, we have our friend from FootballArcheology.com, Timothy P. Brown, the historian, the author, the great researcher of football, Tim Brown. Welcome back to the Pig Pen. Hey, thank you, sir.

Appreciate it, Darin. Looking forward to chatting once again. Yeah, Tim, you brought up a very interesting topic that you want to discuss tonight.

It's about something with the National Archives that you were able to be a part of, and hoping you could explain that to us and share it with us. And maybe some of us can get out there and witness it ourselves. Yeah.

So, you know, I posted a thing about this on my on football archaeology. But so basically what happened is I was invited to attend like a pre-opening of a new exhibit at the National Archives. And, you know, it was first time that I had been there.

But, you know, if you if you've been to D.C. and you checked out the National Archives Museum in the rotunda, they've got the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And then they have one room off to the side that has all kinds of, you know, kind of the history of the archives and the types of records they maintain, et cetera. Then, in the other direction is their special exhibit hall.

And so they recently opened an exhibit called All American, the Power of Sports. And so it's essentially a it's a it's an exhibit that will be open till for another like 14 months or so. But it's all about, you know, the role of sports in in bringing different types of people together.

And so in some cases, what they're, you know, is the emergence of opportunities for African-Americans in sports, for people of different ethnic backgrounds in sports, and for women as well. And so that's that's the general theme. And they've just got some really, you know, it's got some incredibly cool items, you know, a diary or autobiography, you know, that now I'm blanking on his first name, but big Boxer Johnson wrote while he was in, you know, the federal penitentiary.

There were all kinds of just really interesting artifacts, some things from, you know, Japanese internment camps. I mean, you name it. You know, there's a little bit of everything.

But and it was, you know, really nice events. I got to meet Anita Thorpe, Jim Thorpe's granddaughter, because one of the items on display is are his replacement medals, you know, from the 1912 Olympics. Dikembe Mutombo was the featured speaker.

So, you know, he gave a talk, and I had a chance to chat with him. And, you know, there are another, I don't know, half a dozen former NBA guys there. Did he shake his finger back at you? No.

Yeah. Well, I got close enough for him to strike me or wave his finger at me. But I tried to play nice with him.

So now he's, you know, really wonderful guy. He's doing some some great work raising funds for some challenges that, you know, are in Africa today. But but anyways.

And so the reason I was invited is that I had gotten involved in, you know, and, you know, did a lot of research on a story about the in the, you know, within the past year, the National Archives was processing some photographs, some old slides, actually, from West Point. And the guy who was doing the processing noticed that, you know, these were negatives. And so anyway, there are negatives.

He noticed that one of them, instead of all the people in the negative, had black faces in the negative; they had white faces. So he's like, oh, what's going on? You know, so anyway, he checked it out. It turned out to be this 1920s football team that represented the West Point Cavalry Detachment.

So they were Buffalo soldiers, so African-American men. And they were basically enlisted men stationed at West Point who taught, you know, maintain the stables and the horses but also taught horseback riding, et cetera, and cavalry tactics to the cadets, you know, many of whom grew up in a city and maybe didn't have a lot of, you know, experience in horsemanship. But these guys ended up, you know, having sports teams.

And West Point had an enlisted men's league. So there were a group there's a group of enlisted men who supported who helped teach the cadets artillery tactics. And there were other people in like medical and there are other people, you know, so there were different functions and each of them fielded a team.

So as I was, you know, I basically tried to figure out who these guys were. And because, you know, there was an article in The Washington Post about it that hadn't gotten into the detail. So, I basically figured out who these guys played.

I was able to find images of the twenty-eight, twenty-nine, and thirty teams, you know, in the old, you know, Spalding-type football guys. And so, you know, basically, I could start identifying who some of these guys were in the picture. While I was doing that research, I ended up seeing this trophy that a guy had online and, like, you know, a collectors group on Facebook.

And it was like it was a trophy for this West Point enlisted men's league awarded to the cavalry detachment. So I got a hold of them. And, you know, one thing led to another.

You know, it's just we've become friends. Ron Pomprey is the the owner. But when I wrote this stuff up, then the National Archives somehow came across it.

And so they reached out to the combination of Ron and I. And so he has his trophy on loan to the archives and as part of the exhibit. So it's just so that's why the two of us were invited to this thing and, you know, had a wonderful time. And so it was just a great event.

And, you know, there are some people there who just kind of stay in touch. And, you know, I just don't want to go into the names right now, but I'll just have that be very, very cool. What an honor to have something that you wrote be recognized by the National Archives.

And you get invited to go down there and celebrate, you know, this great sports heritage that we have seen here in the United States, along with the owner of the trophy. So that's really cool. Let's.

Yeah. Congratulations on that. Yeah.

So it's anyway, it's really fun. And, you know, just it's a great exhibit. And so if you live in the area generally or if you have plans to go to Washington, yeah, check it out.

You know, I mean, you could you could do it inside of an hour, probably, you know, and get a pretty good, pretty thorough going through. But really, it's a fun exhibit. And then the other reason I just want to point it out is that I. Have been trying to find ways to get some publicity around some of the research that I've done because I've kind of hit a wall.

And so. Anybody out there who was listening to this, who is aware of an ancestor who was with the cavalry detachment. At West Point in the 20s.

But please take a look at the site because I may have images of your grandfather, great uncle, great great, you know, whatever it may be, whatever the relationship may be. So I'm trying to trying to get people to go out there to see if we can identify some additional, you know, some more of these men. Right.

I probably figured out who half of them are, you know, and tracked them down through census records and everything. But there are others. All I have is the last name.

And I just haven't been able to get anywhere with them. Yeah. Get them recognized.

It would be so awesome to have them preserved in history as well and get the recognition they deserve for being, you know, such a pioneer and a trailblazer for what they did. So, yeah. And just, you know, for, you know, all the folks out there, you know, it's just cool to kind of learn something.

You know, I reached out to one or two people who weren't aware that their grandfather or green uncle had been on these teams, you know. So it was something they learned, something new. Yeah, definitely.

Very cool. OK, now I'm going to expose my ignorance, at least my ignorance, in one area. I have many ignorances.

But OK, the National Archives, we know that Washington, D.C., is that connected to the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, or are they all separate entities? Boy, yeah. In terms of organizational structure on that, I do not know. I mean, you know, I think the archives, I think, you know, basically their basic charge is to maintain the history of all public records.

You know, so obviously, they're involved in some of the things going on now with Mar-a-Lago, et cetera. But, you know, that's that's their main charge. And so, I mean, they've got census records.

They've got all kinds of geologic and, you know, you name it. You know, just all kinds of things that. You know, one government entity or another generated the military personnel records, you know, fall under them.

So, I mean, they've got a massive charge. You know, they've got a lot of work to do. So.

All right. So maybe it's a little different. The Smithsonian is just all the other stuff that's the things and the archives is the records and the documentation and data that's collected.

OK, I gotcha. Yeah, gotcha. OK, well, Tim, I very much appreciate you joining us.

Before we let you go, why don't you share with us your website and how people can stay in touch with you and learn about what you share with your tidbits? Yeah. So my website is footballarchaeology.com. It's a substack site, if that means anything to you. But basically, just, you know, just go to the address footballarchaeology.com. You can subscribe there.

That'll result in you getting an email every day with whatever that day's story is. You can also follow me on Twitter, and I'm a football archaeologist there as well. So, following on Twitter is great.

But the unfortunate thing is you might miss a couple of episodes here and there. So if you subscribe, you're going to get every one of them. You can still delete them if you don't want to read them.

But if you miss it, you don't have time to read it. Save it in your inbox, and you can double the pleasure the next day. So that's yeah, you know, and most of them take less than a minute to read.

So, you know, they're they're pretty quick. But good stuff as always. Congratulations again on that great honor of being recognized and getting to go down there and on that visit with your friend who has the trophy.

So, you know, Tim, we enjoy your company each and every Tuesday. Hope that we can continue to do this and talk to you again next Tuesday and get some more football archaeology brought into the pig pen. So, thanks, Tim.

Hey, very good. Thanks, Darin. I appreciate it, as always.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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Ever wondered why quarterbacks wear the number 12 and running backs rock the digit 28? Today's episode dives into the fascinating origin story of American football jersey numbers. We'll travel back in time, uncovering the surprising reasons these numbers were first stitched onto jerseys, and how they evolved into the iconic system we know today. Get ready for a journey through gridiron history, filled with unexpected twists, forgotten rules, and the stories of the legendary players who cemented the tradition of numbered jerseys in the game we love. So, buckle up, grab your favorite jersey (with its number!), and join us as we unveil the fascinating tale behind football jersey numbers!

The early beginnings and origins of the uniform numbers on players are explored in this Football Archaeology feature.

-Transcribed Conversation on Player Number Origins with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to Tuesday. You know what it is. It's footballarchaeology.com day. And Timothy P. Brown of footballarchaeology.com is here to talk about another interesting tidbit he's had out recently. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Darin, how are you? Good to see you. I hope I've got your number tonight.

Well, you got my number. I don't know what the origin of that number is, but I think we're going to find out some of the origins of some player numbers. You had a recent tidbit on that very subject.

And it's something, you know, again, we've talked about this before in other episodes that we've talked about. Some things that we just don't appreciate all the time. You know, what the player number does on the jersey, you know, it's it's identifies the player.

It's almost like their name, you know, for a lot of places. For example, when you see the number 12 out there on a New England jersey, you're probably thinking of Tom Brady. First thing, you know, just but we associate that number with the player.

But it goes back into some things that are beyond that even. And I'd sure like to know the origins of these player numbers. Yeah.

So so some of this this one, you know, I've written about the origins of player numbers a bunch of times in the past. And but I was trying. Well, I was I did an article recently about the the hidden ball trick that the Carlisle executed against Harvard in 1903.

And just in doing that research, reading an article, there was a comment made. And so just to kind of reset the stage on that, you know, what happened is that the. Carlisle.

So, you know, brown patches on the front of their jerseys that match the color of the ball. And so that they could, you know, have their back, who didn't get the ball or whomever else kind of hunched over, act like they're carrying the ball. And, you know, the defense would be confused.

So and so, then they did that. But then they also, in that game, you know, they basically executed this play where there was a. On the kickoff, they were receiving a second-half kickoff, but anyway, they're receiving the kickoff. The Carlisle players go back to form a wedge, and the guy who gets the ball or, you know, who caught the ball.

You know, he kind of gathers the wedge in that web and stuffs the ball in the back under the shirt in the back of one of his teammates who had this elastic band at the bottom of his jersey. So the ball would stay there, you know, under the shirt. And so then they then they boom, they all scatter in different directions.

And this guy who's a was a guard or a tackle who doesn't look like a guy who you would give the ball to starts running upfield, acting like he's going to block, you know, for one of his teammates. And so because he's acting like he's blocking, all the Harvard guys are avoiding him. And he just takes off, runs down the field, and scores a touchdown.

So, you know, that's kind of everybody, you know, I'd been aware of that story and all that kind of thing. And he probably looked like Quasimodo running down the field, too. That's right.

The guy had no idea what to do. But there was a comment made in one of the articles about the game where the guy said, you know, the reporter said it would be great if all the players had numbers; we would have known who this guy was as he was running down the field. And so I thought, OK, I'd never come across that before.

And this is a 1903 game. So it's just got me to go back one more time to look at, OK, when, when did, as I had previously come across Amos Alonzo Stagg calling for numbers in 1901. So, two years before this Harvard-Carlisle game, I just figured, OK, I'll go again.

Can I find anybody else mentioning player numbers? And so then I ended up finding a 1904 reference. And I'm sorry, an 1894 reference from the Harvard-Yale game where some guy along the sidelines must have been some influential alum who said that you know, the players should be numbered. His comment was that the average observer finds as many differences in individuals as in a flock of blackbirds.

So, the first time I heard that reference. But, you know, but the point was that you know, you couldn't tell players apart half the time back then because they didn't have numbers. You know, they, they all kind of, the nature of the game, everybody bunched together.

It's hard to tell who was who, you know, who got the ball, who advanced it, who made the tackle. So, you know, people then, you know, people like Stagg started promoting using numbers. But the challenge and the pushback that they got was people saying, you know, there were basically three main challenges.

One was that they said if you number the players, which they'd started to do in baseball, and I think at first, it actually occurred in rugby in New Zealand. But if you number the players, then that promotes individualism. Football is a team sport.

And so we don't want to promote individuals. So it's this idealistic argument. There was also, from a coaching standpoint, a lot of coaches said, I don't want to number my players because that makes it easier for scouts or for the opposing player to identify who was who.

And to quickly figure out, OK, this is Smith's best running back. You have to watch out for Smith, and you have to make sure you know where Smith is lining up in the playoffs. Now, that all seems kind of dumb. I mean, I get it, but especially from the opposing player's standpoint, no one was wearing numbers on the front of their jerseys; it was only on their backs.

So the opposing players couldn't see them when they lined up anyways, you know, so, so that, you know, but that was, you know, that was the main challenge. And then there was also, you know, people also would say, well, football is for these college players, it's a college sport, you know, there's none of this pro stuff yet or very little of it. And so it's not for the fans.

We don't want to change the game, we don't want to do things in the game to make fans happy; everything should be to make the players happy. Now, you know, as money increasingly got involved in things, and the fans were paying for the players, there are professional marketers of the gridiron just running off the podcast right now.

But, you know, that was a very common sentiment. So anyways, so then it. You know that, as far as I've been able to research, the earliest game in which players have war numbers, and it was a picture in the newspaper, and I published the picture a bunch of times, was a 1905 Iowa State at Drake game on Thanksgiving Day, and both teams were numbers and then, you know, over the next four or five years pit.

As far as I know, Pitt was the second team. They like to claim they were the first because they ignore the night, the Iowa State v. Drake game. Wichita State in 1908. Pitt was the first team in 1909. As far as I can tell, they were the first team to wear them for all games because a lot of times, the team would say I'll wear them, but only if the opponent wears the pit was like no, we're wearing them.

Part of their motivation was that they loved selling scorecards. So there's money involved, right?

Right. And then, in 1909, Michigan and Marquette formed, and then the same year, Cincinnati was too late for them, so those were, as far as I know, the whatever six or seven earliest examples of teams and/or games were. You know, players were numbers.

Yeah, you've done a great job of telling us that, and as you said, you've had a bunch of other fascinating posts on the numbers and some of their intricacies. We'll try to throw some of those links into the pigskin dispatch for this episode. So people can go back and enjoy some of that work with the alphanumerical and all the other crazy Roman numeral numbers. Yeah, four-digit numbers, and we'll put some of those up to so people can enjoy because there's a lot to do with the numbers on jerseys, and it's a lot of fun, so we appreciate that you're doing that and doing the research on it.

You do research on some aspects of football, like every day. It's what you have: plucking things out of the air all over the place and taking us on a wild ride. Sometimes, you have themes like these numbers, but they usually spare my part. Where can people enjoy your tidbits each day? Just go to football archaeology calm.

You can subscribe there. If you subscribe, you'll get an email every night at seven o'clock Eastern with that, you know, that day's episode, and you know there are people who read them five minutes after I publish them, there are other people who, you know, I can just tell by, you know, certain patterns that I can see in the data. Some people like storm up, and they read them on the weekend, so at least you know you have them. If you get the email, you have them. Otherwise, you can follow me on Twitter, Threads, or the subject platform.

All right, Timothy Brown of footballarchaeology.com we thank you very much, sir, for joining us here and we will talk to you again next Tuesday. Very good. Thanks as always.

Love the football jersey designs and evolution wait till you check out the History of American Football Jersey.

-Football Jersey Frequently Asked Questions

-What are American football jerseys made of? Modern jerseys are a mix of synthetic fibers such as polyester or a blend of different materials such asspandex, for more check out our in-depth study ofThe Make up and Materials of Football Jerseys.

-What are some of the unique football jerseys in history? Gridiron jerseys with logos on the front were some what of fad once upon a time. Check this story titled Football Jerseys with Emblems.

-Whose college football jersey was the first to be retured? Red Grange's Number 77 Ilinois Illini jersey was the first college uni to be shelved in 1925. There were a couple more about the same time and we chatted with a college football expert historian help divulge College Football and its First Retired Jerseys.

-Who are some of the most famous NFL players at each jersey number? From Red Grange's jersey number 77 to Tom Brady's iconic number 12, a slew of NFL players made their digits proud. Want to know more? You are in the right place as we covered all 100 jersey numbers and the best to wear each:About Football By Numbers.

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The huddle, a ubiquitous feature of modern football, serves a crucial purpose: concealing play calls from the opposing team. But its origin story is far from today's high-tech headsets and complex plays. It's a tale of innovation born from necessity, showcasing the ingenuity of American football players in the early days.

Historian Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology and his recent post Gather 'Round, Boys: A History of Huddling.

Who invented the concept? When was the first huddle and what was the purpose? These answers and more are converted in the lively discussion with Tim.

Here is the Transcript of our conversation on the origin and history of the huddle

Darin Hayes
Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to another date with footballarcheology.com's Timothy P. Brown. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Timothy Brown
Hey, Darin, I look forward to chatting about huddling today.

Darin Hayes
Tim, you had a title out a little over a year ago called Gather Round Boys. One of your tidbits mentions a history of huddling. But we'd really like to hear the history of this application in football.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, you know, sometimes you look back, and I hadn't looked at this tidbit for a while. And I realized I liked this; it was one of my favorite tidbits. Part of it is that I like the stories where you figure out how something developed. And its function today is not what it served when it first came about. And so huddling is a classic example of that. The other is just that it was one of those tidbits where, while we can't get anybody to see the images that were in the tidbit or that are in the tidbit, I would encourage people to go out and take a look at it. Because, you know, it's just one where I found some great images of the different types of puddles. So, so huddling, you know, there's the first huddling that people have been able to identify was, you know, Gallaudet College in Washington, DC. It's a, you know, college for the people, you know, hearing, hearing impairments. And so, you know, they actually, they used to go up, you know, this is back in the time, the four teams huddled, they would come up to the line of scrimmage, and the quarterback or a captain, somebody on the team, would yell out signals. So, you know, you read all the time in the old newspapers about signals. And it was just, kind of like Audibles, but essentially, you know, what teams did is have a sequential list of numbers for all their plays. And, you know, whereas like, I know, you know, used to be like, if it ended in an even number, it was a play to the right, or if it was odd, it was a play to the left. And, you know, sometimes the first number told you, you know, a 42 meant that it was going to go to the left half back or the right half back or whatever, you know, different kinds of systems made sense. But early on, it was either just a random string of words or a sequence of numbers. So, if you were a player, you had to know what you did on an 83 because that's all you heard. Now, they would hide those numbers in the signaling'd like to do a string of four numbers. And one of them was a code saying the next number is the one that is the play. So anyway, that's kind of the way it worked. A couple of teams here and there huddled, but pretty much nobody huddled until Illinois, and Bob Zuppke changed that in 1921. And they began huddling. But back then, they didn't initially huddle. I mean, part of the purpose was, you know, Zuppke would claim part of it was to get everybody to settle down and be able to listen to the play. It was typically a quarterback then who would call the play. But it was mostly the advantage of huddling was, that was a period when, you know, you had the Minnesota shift, you had the Heisman shift, he had the Notre Dame shift. So teams would line up at the line, you know, one played in, they line up on the line of scrimmage. But often, they would line up in a, say, pre-lineup, like a traditional team. And then shift, there'd be a moment where they'd shift to unbalanced right or unbalanced left, whatever it was. And then they, you know, there wasn't. While the rule said everybody had to pause before starting the play, there was no length of time that they had to pause. So basically, teams would shift in, and boom, the ball would be snapped, and you'd catch the defense, you know, off guard. So Huddle, the Huddle did the same thing, they would call the play in the Huddle, you know, so let me go back, a team that was shifting would line up, call their play, and then at some point, they'd shift, and then execute the play. What huddling did was that they would call it play in the Huddle. And then everybody would quickly run the line of scrimmage, get lined up, and boom, the ball was snapped. So it had kind of the same advantage as that pre-snap shift. But it happened even faster, right? And you know, the defense couldn't react, you know, They couldn't shift anywhere near as quickly as the offense could line up. So that's when Huddling came about in 1921, and teams started applying it. A lot of people said we shouldn't have it; it delays the game, this, that, but ultimately, it proved effective. And so they started using it. And in about 26 or so, the implementer rule said you had to pause for at least one full second after the shift or after coming out of the Huddle. So then that kind of calmed things down a bit. But then, to me, one of the fun things and where these images come into play is that business that I could figure out. There were three or four different styles of huddling. So there were the first Huddles, almost all of what people called the closed, circular, ring, or oval Huddle. So that was where everybody formed the ring. Sometimes, the quarterback is kneeling down, kind of inside the ring. And the lineman tended to be in the front, closest to the, facing away from, but closest to the line of scrimmage; the ends were at either end of this little ring. And then the backs were on the other side facing towards the line. And so that was normal for a long time. That was the classic Huddle. Then people said, well, if we're going to do all this Huddling, we should devise a better way to Huddle. And so, as far as I can tell, Bucknell got it started in 33, but people like USC used it in World War II and da -da -da. And it was called either a V or a triangle Huddle. And so the way that worked was if you think of a V or a triangle, there's kind of like the fat end or the open end of a fat end of a triangle or open end of a V., And so what they do is it had the quarterback at the open end along with one other back. And then the rest of the folks would be in kind of in a V shape, typically facing toward the line of scrimmage with the quarterback on the back facing away from the line of scrimmage. And they could call the play. Most of the team could see the defense and what they were doing. And so that was kind of a cool way to do it. Then, the next one that came along, the late 40s, is the best I could tell. There's a guy named Tom Nugent who was a coach at VMI. Later, he became Lee Corso's coach in Miami. And so he had what was called either the open classroom or typewriter Huddle. And so that was one where, and it's very, teams still use this one, commonly today, quarterback faces away from the line of scrimmage. Sometimes, they turn it around, but he's facing away from the line of scrimmage. And then initially, they'd have the lineman facing the quarterback bent over, and then the backs and ends were facing towards the line of scrimmage standing up, right? That's where almost everybody stands now, but that's probably the most common Huddle today.

Darin Hayes
I see a lot of teams resurging. They're doing that, but the quarterback is standing behind the linemen who are facing the defense, which is kind of interesting—talking in the ear holes or something, I guess.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, in some way, it's always made more sense to have the quarterback facing the defense. He's the one who's calling the place, or he can potentially spot something. But, again, this all is based on the assumption that the quarterback is calling the place, as opposed to a coach on the sideline calling the place. And so all these huddling things were happening when quarterbacks called the place. And, you know, then those rules went away in the early 60s. So, coaching from the sideline, that whole thing disappeared in the early 60s. And so all of a sudden, some people like, you know, Sam, I believe it's white, or white, white, I don't even know how to pronounce his last name, white, white. So, you know, Bengals coach in the 80s. He's the guy who pioneered the no-huddle offense. It's just like, why do we have them huddle anymore? We'll just put them somewhere in the lawn of scrimmage and signal in the general formations that they can get the right spot, and then they can watch us watch our signal, the baseball-style signals from the sideline. And then they've used numbers, you know, all kinds of coaches assistance on the wrists and, you know, the different signage that teams hold up. So you got all that stuff going on, in terms of just ways to signal and plays, but it's a big difference from the days of quarterbacks calling the plays versus the coaches calling the place. So now, just one other thing that I just wanted to add that I mentioned in the tidbit, but I think this is going to make some of them are coaches listening to the podcast, some of them are going to be angered by what I'm about to say or just.

Darin Hayes
Wait a second. Is the coach getting angry?

Timothy Brown
Yeah.

Darin Hayes
This is the first I've heard of this.

Timothy Brown
Well, well, okay. And so one of the things that they used to get angry about, they used to spend all kinds of stupid practice time perfecting, was the Huddle. You know, coaches would go nuts about you having to stand up the right way or you have to snap out of the Huddle. I know, you know, at least in my high school conference, I remember there was a team that when they left the Huddle, the linemen so that they would huddle so like the correct tackle was on the left side of the Huddle and then he would lead people out and as the right card would be next to him. And then so they had this like chain thing where they came out in formation, and it was just a wasted damn time. And so coaches used to spend unnecessary time trying to get a nice neat huddle. It was like making sure your socks are pulled up or make, you know, whatever, you know, it's just like either you can either you make the play, or you don't, either you follow the play call, or you don't execute your assignment, or you don't, I don't care what you look like. Thankfully, like my high school coach was a guy who was, in many ways, a crusty old dude. But he was; he didn't care what color you were, what your background was, what you wore; he just either ran fast, you didn't jump far, or you didn't. And you either made the tackle, or you didn't. So he didn't, you know, concern himself much with what I consider the stupid stuff that many coaches hang on to.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, we, I had a coach; I think it must've been grade school. He was very anal. We were the old, you know, the quarterback would, he, after you get done calling a plate, say, you know, ready. And we'd all go break and have to clap, you know, and break the Huddle that way. And I think, which I think a lot of teams still do. And, uh, if we didn't all clap or he couldn't hear us, like if you're in practice, he stands behind the Huddle and doesn't hear you say break. Oh my God, you, it was an ass-chewing coming from probably some laps being run. So they're anal.

Timothy Brown
I mean, I get, you know, being anal, but that's just being anal about the wrong thing as far as I'm concerned, but

Darin Hayes
Especially when you're in the fourth quarter in a game in August, when it's like 85 degrees, and the last thing you want to do is be yelling, break, and clap, and you wish to, you know, try to get through the rest of this game. Cause you're, you're sweating bullets, and you know, you're tired.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, well, again, at least any negative comments about this will come to you, not because it's on your podcast, not because it's on my site.

Darin Hayes
That's true. So, you know, I've got a couple of interesting comments from some guests that I've had over the years, some claims, you know, you're talking, you know, 1921 with the, you know, this being formalized by Zupke, which is like a few years before Red Green Shop played with Illinois, interesting enough. But we have an author, Jennifer Taylor Hall, who wrote a book on Amos Alonzo's Stag, and she has some claims in her book that give credit to Stag possibly being one of the innovators of the Huddle, using it here and there, not as a formal, you know, every play type of thing. When I just heard recently we had an author, Sam Hatcher, who wrote the book Iceman's First Trophy; it was about the Cumberland Georgia Tech debacle, the 22 and 22 to nothing game, where the Cumberland players didn't want to go up to the line any faster than they had to, so they were sort of hanging back and, you know, catching their breath, licking their wounds, whatever you want to call it, before going up. So he gave some nods to that; I just wanted to mention some of those things, but, as I said, they were not formalized huddles like you're talking about that happened in the 20s.

Timothy Brown
You know, so this is like almost anything else. Amos Lanza Sttag was an absolute coaching pioneer and stud who invented many things. He also gets credit for about 75 things that he should have done. Right? I've done enough research on this stuff, and I'm confident that Subkey is the first one who used it regularly. I know there was a guy named Hargis. I think I have it. Well, anyway, he was a coach at Oregon State. He was a guy from Emporia or one of those schools in Kansas. He ended up at Oregon State in 1919. And, the evidence is he used a huddle in at least one game. There's something unique about about that. So yeah, there were some people who periodically or once or whatever used it, but in terms of using a systematic game after game, using play after play. As far as I know, no one has any evidence of anybody other than Zuppke being the first to do that. So if somebody else has more information, get a hold of me on football archaeology comm, and I will be happy to add a postscript.

Darin Hayes
Yeah, I wasn't saying they were arguing with what you're saying. I was just, cause the, the Huddle has had a bit of history, whether, you know, I, I don't have it confirmed or not, but I'm just saying they, they made mention of it in their writing. So it's just,

Timothy Brown
And yeah, there are all kinds of things like that, like who the first face mask was. What was the first face mask? Okay, define face mask, right? What is a face mask? What's the difference between the old nose guards, some of which became pretty huge, and a face mask, you know, or like, so what's a huddle? What does it mean to huddle? Right, so depending on how you define that, you might go, you know, in a different direction. I'm using huddling the way we use it today.

Darin Hayes
Call it calling the play. You have a gathering to call it the play. Here's what, yeah, okay. Well, very, very good, enjoyable as always, Tim. We appreciate it. No, you have a lot of fascinating tidbits and pieces of information that are Built on what we know of as football today and some of the elements of it in foot-on football archaeology. You could share with the listeners how they can find your site and what to expect.

Timothy Brown
Yeah, go to footballarchaeology .com. It's a Substack site or newsletter. You can go there any time you want. But also, you can subscribe. You'll get an email every time that I open or that I create a new story. There's a paid version. There's an unpaid version. You can also follow me on Twitter, threads, or the Substack app. And if you're somebody like this, you can follow them on the Substack app. And if you want to follow but have yet to get the emails, well, you'll get it that way by a Substack. So, whatever suits your fancy works for you.

Darin Hayes
All right, well, that's very good. As always, this is a fascinating topic, and we really appreciate you coming on here and sharing with us. We'd love to talk to you again next week.

Timothy Brown
Very good. I look forward to seeing you.

---

Ever seen a penalty flag thrown and wondered, "Wait, why'd they move the ball THAT far?" Well, friends, get ready to dive into the strange world of "half-the-distance" penalties in American football!

These penalties, often triggered by infractions inside a team's own territory, can result in some truly eye-opening yardage assessments. Today, we'll be tackling some of the longest half-the-distance penalties in NFL history. We'll be dissecting the plays, the penalties, and the impact they had on the game. Were they backbreakers for the offending team? Did they create crazy scoring opportunities for the defense?

So, buckle up, football fans! Let's get ready to analyze some of the most unusual and potentially game-changing penalties the NFL has ever seen!

Let's listen to some of the most extended half-the-distance penalties in Football History by Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on the Longest Half-Distance Penalties

Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. We also have another great episode where we get to talk to Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Talk about one of his most recent tidbits. Some of those unique aspects of football history.

Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Thank you, Darin. I Look forward to talking about the penalty situation in football.

Yeah, this is a very fascinating tidbit you had back in late May. It was titled football's longest half the distance penalty. Now we're we're sitting there, you know, in our modern times, we think of a half a distance penalty.

You know, somebody gets penalized and gets the penalty, gets walked back towards their own goal line. And usually, maybe they're at the nine-yard line, and it's, you know, a holding call, and they got to walk back to the four and a half or whatever. That's what we're doing.

But you're talking about something entirely different here as far as yardage. It's not a four-and-a-half-yard walk-off. These are some of the massive jaunts for the teams to travel.

So please do tell. You know, I mean, so early football didn't necessarily have distance penalties as we think of them today. Typically, the penalty for the fouls that were called was the loss of the ball.

You know, it was a turnover. But then they, you know, kind of recognized those were too severe. So then they started, you know, especially after the field got marked with yard lines, and they started doing distance penalties.

And so in 1889, there were they created that was the first half the distance penalties, and that was for, you know, intentionally tackling below the knees because you couldn't tackle below the knees, then budding, tripping and throttling, which was choking. And so that penalty was 25 yards or half the distance. And then, you know, later on, they started doing some things where it was.

Like in 1908, they kind of bundled all the unsportsmanship penalties together, and they made it if you committed an unsportsmanlike penalty, then you were disqualified and your team was penalized half the distance. And that that stayed in place till like 1947. And then then they limited the half distance to to 15 yards.

Right. So you couldn't be more than it was, whichever was 15 yards or half the distance, but Max was 15 yards. And so that's, you know, like you said in the open, it was, we think of a half a distance, half the distance penalty is applying when you're inside your own 30.

Right. If you're at the 45, either either 45, it doesn't matter. It's just whatever the normal penalty is.

And, you know, we cap them at 15 yards nowadays, but 25-yard penalties used to be pretty common. So, you know, before we kept them, there was the opportunity in a half-the-distance world for some really long penalties. And now, I mean.

I'm kind of limited by the way I can search in these newspaper databases, so I'm searching for keywords and strings of words. So I can't say that I found the longest. It's what I found that was the longest that I found, but it's still pretty long.

So the longest one that I came across was in a 1901 game Northwestern against Minnesota. Northwestern was in the red zone. They were on Minnesota's eight yard line.

A Northwestern player jumped off the side and slugged a Minnesota player. So they called the penalty. So they were on the eight.

This was in the days of the 110-yard field. So that meant that you know, 110 minus eight was 104 or no, I'm sorry, 102. And so they walked off a 51-yard penalty against Northwestern, which took the ball, as it turned out, it took the ball all the way back to Northwestern's 51-yard line.

Right. And then, in 1906, I found Vanderbilt got nailed for a 32-yard penalty in the same year Penn State got hit with a 30-yard penalty. And then, at that point, I stopped looking.

You know, I mean, I found a couple of instances, and then, in 1912, they reduced the length of the field to 100 yards. So there's no way you were going to have a 50 another 51 yard penalty. So anyway, it's possible that there was a 52, 53, or 54-yard penalty at some point out there.

I didn't find it. But if somebody else wants to go look at it and let me know if you find it. But, you know, it's still it's just kind of, you know, really fun.

And that that these existed. And then, but even after the field was reduced, you know, the thirty-three Pittsburgh Pirates running back was heading into the head, headed towards the end zone. Stiff arms the opponent but stiff arms him in the face.

And he gets called for an unsportsmanlike penalty at the two-yard line. So, there is a forty-nine-yard penalty as they walk off half the distance. Right.

So that's likely the longest or at least ties for the longest. So in the hundred yard NFL officials have been against the Steelers even before they were the Steelers back in the Pirates days in the first year. Yeah.

Thirty-three. I'm not going to play your game there with the officials who do not understand your Steelers. But the other thing that's just kind of funny is, OK, so now this half-the-distance thing is capped, you know, at 15 yards.

But you mentioned your favorite Steelers and now I grew up a Packer fan, but I've lived in Detroit long enough that there is a certain amount of lioness that has become part of my body. So I can appreciate, given the Lions history, that in 2015, a cornerback to the Lions incurred a 66 yard pass interference penalty. Because, you know, in the NFL, pass interference is a spot foul, right? Right.

So 66 yards downfield, he committed a little P.I. And so it was the Packers, which was OK by my standards. So, you know, 66 yards on a penalty. Yeah, those are astounding facts.

I did an article last year. I did some of the NFL's longest fourth and yardage to go penalties. It was it was fascinating.

I mean, we had a fourth and twenty nine that was converted by Ray Rice in 2012. The Oakland Raiders had a third and forty eight against Kansas City that I think they end up getting first down back in 2013. But in 1971, the Patriots had fourth and sixty three against the Cowboys.

And the biggest one, though, was my Steelers had fourth and seventy four against the Raiders in 1970. And they punted and the punt only traveled fifty five yards. So they were still 20 yards behind the sticks after the fun.

There were no half-the-distance penalties. I was going through that earlier to see if I could find something in there that helps your story, but that's just part of the thing. Like before, like in college football, you really don't have much in the way of there are no consistent statistics until thirty-six or thirty-eight, which it is.

But even then, it was just a subset of all the major colleges. So so, you know, the things so looking for like the longest half the distance penalty, there's no source. You know, there's no database that has that.

You know, you can only search for it using like newspaper databases and, you know, those kinds of things. But the other thing that it brings up and I wanted to ask you about it as a former official. Is, you know, one of the one of the problems football had over the years was.

The lengthier the penalty, the more reluctant officials often were to call the penalty. Because, you know, they you know, they didn't want to be the ones deciding the game. I mean, they would if need be.

But on things like, you know, a lot of the early clipping calls, they weren't, and they didn't want to call clipping. You know, it's kind of just the nature of the game. People accepted it.

So things like that, you know, that. So, that was one of the reasons they got rid of those 25-yard penalties. You know, it just was too much of they felt like it put too much power in the hands of an official who often were overworked back then, especially, you know, they you had three or four men, four-man crews trying to figure out what, you know, watching everybody on the field.

You know, it just wasn't possible. Yeah, I think it's a lot of human nature. I mean, most people, and I will put most before that, don't want to inflict the ultimate sentence upon their fellow man.

So, I mean, it's just human nature. You don't want to do it. I mean, one of the things I guess we could compare in modern times is somebody getting a little loose with their arms against another player.

It's taking a swing at them. And, you know, in high school football, even a swing and a miss is an automatic ejection. And most states have it where you will not play the next game after if you're ejected in a game, you're disqualified not only for that game but for the following game.

So you're really punishing him. So so that goes to the back of officials minds. I mean, it's got to be something very blatant to to get ejected from a game for the most part, especially when you know you're going to get dequeued for the following contest.

But I think that has some merit to what you're saying. A 25-yard penalty. That's that's pretty substantial.

You know, that's a quarter of the field. And could definitely change a game in a heartbeat. Well, you know, but if you think about, you know, back to the origins of penalties, penalties were turnovers or fouls, you know, were turnovers.

The penalty was the loss of the ball. So, you know, forward passes until 1906 forward passes the turnover, you know, on sportsmanship on sportsmen like, you know, conduct until 1889 was a turnover. So, you know, and then dequeues were, you know, much more common.

I mean, people should get up in arms about targeting disqualifications now. But, you know, hey, to me, if, you know, if you if you're going to endanger, you know, if you're going to endanger another player, then that's not good. And I personally love what college football does with the targeting.

And, you know, it's called on the field, and they really take a great look at it to make sure that the official on the field was calling it on the spot to get it right, says it is going to be an impactful thing. It might be the star linebacker getting ejected or staying in the game. You know, it's so many times you see that happen in the last couple of years since they've been doing that and enforcing it and even getting rid of the penalty.

Sometimes I think it's a great thing for football. And I'm glad that they do that. Yeah.

And I mean, people go, and people make a lot of arguments against it. And, you know, hey, you know, when I played, I was aggressive with Bob about, you know, whatever, go ahead and tell your story. But it's like.

You know, you just have to learn not to hit that way in that situation. You know, they all know where the sideline is. They all know, you know, things like when the ball's coming and you can't hit the pass receiver until he gets a ball, all those things.

They're aware. And so, to me, I don't buy the argument that, you know, it can't be controlled. Right.

Go lower. Go higher. Don't hit the guy in the head.

A good legal tackle has just as much impact, I think, as somebody crushing somebody in the head or whatever. And the guy's probably not going to be hurt, you know, by a good tackle on the midsection. You know, just a good wrap-up.

So, yeah, I think that goes a lot to teach the teaching technique of modern coaches. You know, just teach them to hit and wrap up and take a guy down instead of trying to take him down with a blow. Yeah.

You don't need to decapitate. Right. Right.

Well, Tim, great stuff. Great discussion. You know, I know we got a little bit off-topic with the half-distance penalties, but it brings up so many great elements of football, of the game of yesteryear and today.

And you do that each and every day with some of these tidbits, just like this one, where you bring up something that's maybe not the mainstream talk of football history or even modern-day football, but you bring it into a new light and a story of its own. And we'd love for you to share with the listeners how they, too, can enjoy these on a daily basis. Yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, I just try to find things that I think are interesting every day and that shed light on past practices and hopefully illuminate something about the current game, at least something that we can compare ourselves to. And so, you know, if you're interested in following, just go to footballarchaeology.com and subscribe.

You'll get an email every day in your inbox at 7 o'clock Eastern that has that story. And otherwise, you can follow me on Twitter at football archaeology. Either way, if you're interested, consume it however it is that makes you happy.

Well, Tim, we thank you for once again joining us here. And I'm going to throw this out here, Tim, and hopefully you won't get angry with me. But these are such interesting things.

And I'm sure there are a lot of listeners who may have questions about where something started in football. And maybe we could get them in contact with you. And maybe on a future show, we could answer some of those questions.

So either you go on to Tim's website, footballarchaeology.com, or you can email me at pigskin-dispatch at gmail.com. And send in your questions about where something started. And maybe Tim has it in one of his multiple books or on one of his tidbits. And if not, he loves to put on that research hat and hit the library hard and the newspaper archives.

And we'll try to find something for you. So, Tim, thanks again. And we will talk to you again next week.

Very good. Darin, thank you very much, as always.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

---

How important is the kick off right after the half in football? Can the game be better served by starting a half in a different way? Would this break tradition and ruin the game?

These questions were posed to rules makers long ago as well as in the modern era. Timothy P. Brown examines a session of thought along these lines from his Tidbit, Getting A Kick Out Of The Second Half.

-Transcription of the Elimination of the 2nd Half Kick with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends, this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And we are going to go in a really historic mode here and go with Timothy P. Brown and his FootballArcheology.com daily tidbits. He has one from January that we're going to talk about the kickoffs starting the second half.

Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Darin, thank you. Appreciate being here and looking forward to chatting once again this evening.

Yeah, it's, you know, an interesting topic that you are talking about. We know, you know, traditionally in football, I can't think of a football game where I've ever had anything else besides unless you get some exotic like the original XFL where you start the game in each half with a kickoff, and the second half is no exception. And, you know, you've got some interesting story from the past on the second-half kickoff that we'd love to hear about.

Yeah, so this is, you know, this story, and I think, to put it in context, you kind of have to start from the standpoint that football is a game, and all games are just made up. It's got a made-up set of rules that are totally arbitrary. You know, if we decided tomorrow that a touchdown was going to be worth 24 points, boom, we make the change.

And that's what it is. It's just everything about the game is arbitrary. So, you know, basketball, you could give people two steps per dribble or use a 12 foot high basket.

Baseball could be three balls and two strikes. You know, I mean, so anything is negotiable. So, for various reasons, there have been times when people wanted to get rid of the kickoff in the second half.

And, you know, football had a kickoff in the second half because soccer or rugby had one. And, you know, that's kind of the only reason we, you know, we had it. And there's been suggestions to get rid of it for safety reasons.

You know, Amos Alonzo Stag, you know, argued for it. You know, go back in the day. But so there periodically, you know, this is what is an idea that kind of came up time and again and just never happened.

So it came up in 1898. It came up in 1928. It came up in the 30s a couple of times, but it just never happened because what they were one of the ideas that people throughout there was, instead of kicking off in the second half, just put the ball back where it was at the end of the first half.

And the team that had possession just takes possession and just carries on because, you know, kind of the thinking was halftime's really just to allow the players to rest. So, just put the ball back where it was. Right.

So it's almost like ending in the first quarter, going into the second quarter, the third quarter, and going into the fourth quarter. Yeah, exactly. Right.

So that's actually a great, you know, that's a great kind of analogy. I mean, we had the quarter system come in later on, too. Right.

But anyways, so, you know, but so if you think about it, just, you know, one of the fun things to play with this kind of what how would it change the game strategy? You know, if we adopted, you know, if next year for college football, we said, you know what, we're not going to kick off in the second half anymore. We're going to put the ball wherever it was spotted at the end of the first half. So if you're if you're on offense, how does that change your thinking about what you're doing at the end of the first half? You know, if you have it on the 48 or the 38, you're probably not going to try a long field goal just because time's running out.

You know, you're not going to be as risky, perhaps in your play calling, you know, because, you know, and both, you know, in certain situations, you might also be willing to, you know, if if you turn the ball over either on downs or otherwise, you know, you still got your opponent deep in their end zone. So even if they start the second half with the ball, they're down on the two or on the 10 or 15, whatever it may be. So just, you know, some of those kinds of things.

It's just kind of interesting to think about how that would change the game. You know, I mean, like if you're trying to manage the clock. At the end of the first half, you know, there's really no reason to manage the clock very much, right? It would definitely take an exciting element out of the game because there's that panic and urgency at the end of each half, you know, the end of the game, definitely. But at the end of the first half, there's that urgency to, hey, I got to get in field goal range or go into that two-minute or four-minute offense to get down there.

And there's an excitement that really puts you on the edge of your seat, so to speak. And, you know, that would be definitely an element that would probably be taken away that I don't I think some a lot of football traditionalists would be up in arms if they said, as you said, college football is going to no second-half kickoff. You know what I think? Well, OK, but the flip side of that.

And so, I mean, we know that this whole thing, this excitement, has evolved, right? Because, you know, there were times like the whole two-minute drill. That's, you know, that didn't really come about to the late 50s, early 60s. So, you know, some of this stuff has evolved.

Also, different approaches may have evolved. The other side of it is imagine the first half ends, and I'm on offense, and I've got the ball on your two-yard line. OK, well, half ends, we go into our locker rooms, and then we come back out on the field.

And now, the whole time, you're sitting there thinking, damn, they've got the ball on the two. And I'm like, who, we've got the ball, you know? So, I mean, there would be a whole lot of other kinds of anticipation during halftime when thinking about what you're going to do. How are you going to respond? You know, what play am I going to call? What defense are you going to try to call, you know, against it? You know, so I don't know.

I think there's some there, you know, that could potentially be interesting things. But the other side of it is some of the same kind of dissatisfaction with, you know, with kind of the way how the half ended. You know, there were times when I've written an article about this, too, but there have been times when people proposed getting rid of the clock entirely.

And instead of playing for 15 minutes, they would play 20 play quarters. So whoever got the ball, you know, if they had a 19-play drive, well, then the other team would only get one play that quarter. And they were actually, you know, there were some test games, you know, using that in the, I want to say, like 22, 23 eras.

Some people argued that the teams should be given five downs inside the 20 because they wanted to give them a chance to score. Right. So anyway, and then other people even like Pop Warner argued for giving teams a point for every first down.

You know, so, you know, I don't know. These are all kind of bizarre little. Well, we think they're bizarre because we're used to a certain set of rules, but.

All three of those or and the, you know, the change in our elimination of the kickoff makes sense to it's just. A different idea. Yeah, I can remember back in my officiating days, and this is pretty recent, probably like 15 or 20 years ago, where you had the traditional second-half coin toss when it really wasn't a coin toss.

It's just the captains that come out and make their choices. But this was before they had a deferment. You could defer the first half kickoff.

You only had to take the ball or, you know, which end of the field. Those are two choices back in high school in those days. So, about the time they had a deferment, they came up with eliminating that second-half conference of the captain of the team who lost the first-half coin toss to decide what they should do.

So you would know what they do is you go when you go in the locker room to grab the teams, the officials that go in there, you ask the coach, hey, you know, you want the ball, right? And, you know, usually you don't want to give them a choice. So they make a wrong choice. And you don't really have the kids make the choices because that really goes bonkers and sometimes upside down.

Kids just didn't understand that. And that's really what happened, why they did that with a deferment rule because the first couple of years of the deferment, kids would come out there, and their coach would say, if we win the toss, we want to defer, so we can have the second off kickoff. So the kids would come out when the coin toss and say, we want to defend that goal because that's what coach told us.

And they really that's what you want to do. Yeah, the coach says, I'm like, OK, and you go to the other team. Yeah, I'll take those.

They get the ball, both halves. So that's something that came to my mind when you're talking about eliminating the second-half kickoff because there's sort of a parody and fairness to that. OK, you get you won the coin toss, and you get the kickoff in the first half.

But in the second half, the other team gets it to sort of level that out with, you know, as best you can to have the, you know, even amount of chances to score, I guess, is, you know, it doesn't really work out that way very often. But at least on paper, it sounds pretty good, sounds pretty fair. And I'm just sitting there thinking, man, if they did something like you're talking, if that would have ever taken place, how important would that opening kick opening coin toss be? I mean, nobody would. There wouldn't be deferment anymore because you wouldn't have a second-half option, and nobody would pick a goal.

You would say, hey, I want the ball. There's no doubt about it. You'd be on offense first if you won.

Right. But, you know, originally in football. You know, just like, you know, if you watch a soccer match today, the team that starts the game by kicking the ball, they keep possession of it.

And that's the way football is, too. You know, you, the kicking team, just dribbled it a couple of feet and then picked it up and tossed it to one of their buddies. Right.

I mean, the original flying wedge was what that was all about. You dribble, dribble, kick it a couple of feet, and then the wedge closes on the guy who's the kicker, and they start running down the field. You know, so, you know, that a lot of that stuff, you know, I mean, at one point, it would have been crazy to say, well, you got to kick the ball at least 10 yards.

But, you know, that took like two decades or something for that group to come into play. So, you know, the kickoff is not always what, you know, what it is today. The other thing that comes to my mind, I guess, in comparison, is sort of what basketball did with the tip-off.

I remember we used to have a tip off both halves. Every time, you know, joint possession, you'd have a tip off. Now they have the possession arrows.

You really have that one tip-off; just alternate back and forth. Again, to try to put some parody in there. But yeah, that's a that's a that's a really good analogy.

But, you know, football also used to switch directions every time a team scored. You know, really? Wow. Yeah.

That's back, you know, the 1800s. But, you know, that's what they did. Well, you scored, and you switched.

That's an officiating nightmare there, especially with us officials that they have back in. Wow. That's something very interesting stuff.

That's interesting. I'm glad it didn't happen that way. I'm glad it is the way it is.

I'm more you're just you're just I love the way it is. Yeah, I know. I got to be more flexible there.

I'm pretty rigid about that kind of stuff. But great, great stuff. I love to hear history like that.

That's something you don't hear every day. And I haven't heard heard before. So very interesting.

So, Tim, you have these tidbits that come out each and every day. And I'm sure the listeners would love to know how they can to read about your tidbits. So why don't you please share that information with them? Well, I'm going to defer that to the next podcast.

OK, well, that while we're not having a second-half one. So sorry you lost your choice. OK, so yeah.

So, you know, if you're interested, if you want to make sure you get it every day or at least see it every day, you just go to my website, footballarchaeology.com. You can subscribe. And what will happen, you'll get an email every every night, seven o'clock Eastern with basically an email newsletter kind of format with the story. Alternatively, you can go to the site and read it, or you can follow me on Twitter at Football Archaeology.

OK, ladies and gentlemen, Timothy P. Brown, footballarchaeology.com. Make sure you check out his site, sign up for his tidbits, and listen to him every Tuesday on pigskindispatch.com. Tim, thanks again for joining us. Hey, very good. Thank you, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

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Penalties are a regular occurrence in football, a constant tug-of-war between offense and defense. But sometimes, amidst the yellow flags and frustrated shouts, a penalty emerges that defies logic and leaves everyone scratching their heads. Today, we delve into one such oddity – the curious case of the two-yard penalty in American football history.

This podcast episode and article explore a specific instance where a very unusual penalty enforcement resulted in a mere two-yard loss. We'll dissect the situation, analyze the rule that led to such a peculiar outcome, and explore the reactions of players, coaches, and fans to this bizarre moment on the gridiron.

Was it a simple mistake by the officials? Did the specific situation create an unforeseen loophole? Perhaps it was a turning point in the evolution of penalty enforcement. Join us as we unearth the story behind the two-yard penalty, a historical footnote that serves as a reminder of the unexpected twists and turns that can occur in the ever-evolving world of football. So, buckle up and get ready for a lighthearted yet fascinating exploration of a truly odd penalty in football history!

-Transcripption of Football's 2-Yard Penalty with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends, Darren Hayes and PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. It is Tuesday, and we are going to go into an archaeological dig that is a part of the great history of the gridiron. And our friend Timothy P. Brown of football archaeology is leading the way.

And we're going to talk about one of his recent tidbits on penalty enforcement, which is sort of an odd yardage. Tim, welcome to The Pig Pen. Hey, good evening, Darren.

Good to see you as always. And to hear your dulcet voice. Dulcet.

Well, that's one of the higher compliments. Usually, people say something else about my voice, especially family members. I don't know what's going on with that.

So I'll take that. I only have to listen to you a couple of times. That's true.

That's true. Well, Tim, you had a really fascinating tidbit back a couple of months ago, and it's on a very odd penalty yardage and under some special circumstances in football history that I think maybe we'd like to hear about this story. Yeah, so this is, you know, everybody knows that 1906 is a big year in terms of changing football rules, introduced forward pass, forward progress, you know, really is kind of fully, well, not fully developed, but pretty well developed that year.

You know, the onside kick from scrimmage, you know, I mean, there were just a host of different rule changes. However, one thing that people don't pay much attention to is the rule that limited captains to calling three timeouts per half. Until then, captains could call as many timeouts as they wanted.

There was no rule. But by kind of tradition and practice, and, you know, people did the right thing, they didn't call many timeouts. I mean, they basically called a timeout for injury.

And then occasionally, if they needed, if they needed, you know, just they needed a rest. You know, and this is, again, back when coaches couldn't coach the players during the game, their teammates couldn't yell instructions to them, nothing. It was, you know, you're out there on your own as a quarterback.

So, when they introduced that rule in 1906 if a team had called three timeouts or had had those timeouts called for them by the referee if they called a fourth timeout, they incurred a two-yard penalty. So, you know, this is one where, as far as I know, this is the only two-yard penalty in football history. And there was a caveat that you could, if you had called three, and you had a player injury, there could be another timeout without penalty.

So there could be a fourth due to injury. So, you know, it wasn't called very often, but it was called in 1906 in a game in Indiana that was beating Notre Dame, you know, 12-0 late in the game. And Notre Dame called a fourth timeout due to injury, but the referee penalized.

Now, you know, it's unknown at this time, you know, based on newspaper reports, was it because the ref just made an error, just didn't understand the rule, or because he thought the player was feigning an injury, right? So, one way or another, he calls it. And then it kind of, you know, I mean, at least in terms of newspaper reports, there's not, there's virtually no mention of these two-yard penalties for another 15 years or so. But then, in the early 20s, teams started huddling between plays.

And there were a lot of referees who didn't like teams huddling. They wanted them to keep, you know, immediately lining up on the line, calling the plays at the line, and, you know, executing. So, some of the referees started penalizing teams for huddling.

And again, this is one of these things; it's a little bit unclear exactly how they justified it, but it is likely that what they were doing was, you know, a team could huddle three times if they wanted to, but if they huddled a fourth time, in effect, the referee was interpreting that as you're taking a timeout, whether you call it or not. I'm basically treating this as a timeout when you huddle. And so the fourth time they huddle, boom, they get a penalty.

And so, you know, so that kind of sucked. And, like, you know, Penn got penalized six times against Alabama in 1922. So, in one game, they got six two-yard penalties.

So then you sit back and go, how big a deal is a two-yard penalty? You know, it's just not that big of a deal. And so what teams started doing then is to just say, if I need a break, I'm calling an extra penalty. I don't care.

You know, what am I going to do? Lose two yards? Yeah. Hell yeah. I mean, especially if you're down, whether you got to go two yards or 22 yards, what's the difference? Yeah.

So then, obviously, the refs and the rule makers didn't like that. So in 1924, they gave teams four timeouts per half, but then the fifth one would be a five-yard loss. And you know, same with six, seven, eight.

So, you know, that was the end of the two-yard penalty. But other than in 1930, 31, and that period, at that point, if there was a penalty on an extra point, it was committed by the offense. The offense lost the ball, and, you know, you went to the kickoff process.

They didn't get a chance to score, but the defense committed a penalty. Then the offense was credited with having made the extra point. And so they changed that in like 31.

And so they just changed it so that whatever penalties were incurred, the refs walked off whatever the typical, you know, whatever penalty yards they would have done during regular play. So, halfway to the goal line, or you had a 15-yard penalty, you got moved back to the 17, you know, whatever it was at the time. So yeah, the two-yard penalty led to a fairly short life.

Yeah. I always wonder because usually the penalty is that it fits the bill for whatever the foul was, you know, and they try to balance that out, and they've tweaked things around a little bit. You know, maybe they over-penalized certain things over the years, but a two-yard penalty, as we said earlier, is really no. There's no penalty to it.

You know, it's a big deal. The other thing I found interesting when I started officiating in the late 80s was when teams were just now starting to go to no-huddle. You know, Jim Kelly and the Bills were having some success at the pro level, and it was going right down to levels. And there were some older officials, especially umpires, who like to have time to set that ball, get, you know, set, you know, seven yards off the ball behind the linebackers.

So they're in a safe place. Well, they have these teams going up the line. They're having to drop that ball down and beat feet and get out of there before they get smoked, you know? And if the referee wasn't, was blown ready for play too early, that ball's getting snapped and things.

So, I can remember people and officials standing up at meetings. You know, when you have big rules meetings with the local coaches and all the local officials, when you have all the new rules, you have the same interpretation. So we're all on the same page; at least, that's what we did in Pennsylvania at the time. And, you know, there's, there's referees saying, Hey, you know, there should be a penalty for this.

You know, what do you mean? No, you aren't huddling. So it's funny how, you know, what is it 50, 60 years later, you know, we're, we're looking the exact opposite way. We're expecting teams to huddle.

And when they don't, we get mad. Yeah. Well, you know I've got a, I haven't written it yet, but I'm going to do a tidbit on I'm sure you've seen the, it's a 1903 two or three minute film of Yale and Princeton playing.

And so it's the first instance in which a football team has been captured playing football. And so it, it, that little film document, and you can find anybody can find it on YouTube. If you just put in a 1903 Princeton, Yale football movie or something like that, you'll find it right away.

And, like, the first part of it just shows guys running around and coming out of the locker rooms or whatever. But once you get into the actual play, you know, they execute a play and immediately get on the ball, running the quarterback call signals, boom, and run another play. And so, you know, that's just evidence of how they did that at the time.

And that's because that's what they did in rugby. You know, you, somebody, you know, got tackled or whatever, they set the ball down and boom, you just get going again, you know, you line up and play. And so there was no rule about that.

You know, the rule about 25 seconds or 30 seconds didn't come into play until 1926 or so because of huddling. Right. I mean, they wanted to make sure that the pace of play remained somewhat normal.

But until then, it was all just tradition. You know, you, that's how you play football. You got up and you, you know, you played, you know, it's kind of like pitch count or, you know, the pitch clock kind of a thing, you know, it's gotten so crazy that now they need to, you know, they need to have a timer to stop players from, you know, rubbing their nuts for, for two minutes up there at the plate.

All right. So it's, if you think about it, those are really two kinds of interesting, it's an interesting parallel, the pitch clock versus the, you know, the ready for play and, you know, 25 seconds, 30 seconds, whatever it is, you know, depending on the league. You're right.

There's another early film. It's got to be that same, and I think it's 1903. Also, there's a Michigan film out there.

Right, right. Same thing. But of course, that's the point a minute team of, you know, of Fielding Yoast going on there too.

So, but I can remember there's one play in there where the guy gets hurt, and he's at the bottom of the pile, and they're in such a hurry to keep the game going. They just drag him by his legs off the sideline, and he goes off a second later. And that happened all the time, you know, just because, you know, because there was no substitution at that point, you know, guys would be laying there on the side of the, you know, in the backfield just, you know, they could, they'd lay there for a minute or two and played, continue, you know, just nuts.

Yeah. I keep meaning, I got to load up some of those, those YouTubes of that, that we'll put them on the site here in the next couple of weeks. So they're interesting to see.

And so listeners, you can, you can check them out there or, you know, go to, I know Library of Congress has them, YouTube has them. They're public domain. So they're real easy to get to.

So well, Tim, that's a that's a fascinating story on this two-yard penalty and the history of it. And you know, it's evolution, and thank God it's riddance out of the game of football. And you know, you have a lot of different little stories like this that are sort of off the beaten path, but really vital parts of football history that were important in the era that they happened.

And we sure are glad that you're going back and looking at these, researching them, and giving all the facts each and every night on something. So if you could, maybe you could share with the listeners how they could, you know, share in these tidbits that you put out each night also. Yeah, sure.

Thanks. Yeah. I mean, it's my site is footballarchaeology.com. You can also follow me on Twitter at footballarchaeology.

So, you know, on Twitter, it's going to be kind of hit or miss whether you see what I post or not. Whereas in, you know, if you subscribe on the website, you'll get an email every night with that night's post. And then obviously you can always just go to the site and there is a search function there.

If there's a specific topic in football history that you're interested in, just go in there and put in the keywords. See if you find anything. If you don't, shoot me in the message and I'll, you know, maybe it's out there and you just didn't find it or it didn't get, you know, it didn't enter the right words, but happy to always looking for topics, always looking for new things to or old things to research.

Right. The new and old things. All right.

Timothy P. Brown, footballarchaeology.com. Make sure you check out his site and his tidbits each and every day and listen to him each and every Tuesday right here on pigskindispatch.com. Tim, thanks a lot. And we will talk to you again next week. Great.

Thank you again, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.